Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw that another Ram was being investigated for drugs. Remember, I’m just recognizing who I am, and it’s not all pretty. And then I saw that. It made me so angry I just had to write John [Shaw]. I didn’t even know James Harris. Didn’t know anything about James Harris, but I was so angry that his name even came up—especially with the Rams. [See Chapter 7.] Everything was too close to home. Just his name, the Rams, I couldn’t believe it. My first reaction was that maybe I should talk to this dude, tell him what he needs to do. But I was so angry that I couldn’t do it. I was angry because I kept thinking: ‘Am I just wasted, that this has happened here? Is this just a waste? People don’t even recognize what the hell is going on? This ain’t no joke. This is real.’ This is not attractive. This is far different than what you could ever imagine.
“If you flirt with danger, it will find you,” Henley said, sitting in the cramped interview room at Marion. “You want the message? That’s it. If I can get caught up with the bad guys, with all that I had going for me, there better not be anyone out there who believes it can’t happen to them. We’re all vulnerable, just not all of us get caught.”
Game Plan
Darryl Henley knows how it starts. The onetime star cornerback of the Los Angeles Rams knows how the slippery slope of abhorrent yet accepted behavior by athletes begins. He also knows how it can end. For him, it ended in the nation’s toughest prison, where he sits confined in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell twenty-three hours a day.
“We know, as athletes, when ‘it’ begins,” Henley said, using his forefingers to punctuate his sentence. “It is when you know you are good enough to get away with stuff—and make no mistake, the better you are, the more you get away with. When you get to a certain level you get away with more. It starts out small. Come late to a meeting in college and you don’t get in trouble. The other guys do. You get chastised, that’s it.
“So you don’t do it again for two months. You get chastised again. They say, ‘You won’t play on Saturday.’ You’re going to play and you know it. I heard one guy say his coach told him, ‘I don’t care what the hell you do during the week, long as you’re there for that game on Saturday.’ His job is based on Saturday’s performance. He knows it. You know it too.
“It goes from a missed meeting to a Friday night frat party. You get in a fight because you’re drunk. Then the coaches want to know what happened. You tell them and the institution covers it up for you. No big deal. So it goes from that to a drunk driving charge. You’re not high, just drunk. Guys don’t get pulled over because they’re on coke. It’s
just
drunk driving. ‘We were having a good time, coach, and you know …’ Well now you’re not living on campus anymore, you’re off campus. You can’t walk to your dorm, you tell him. There’s no such thing as drunk walking, so of course you’re going to get caught drunk driving. He understands. He was there once. It’s accepted behavior as long as you don’t hurt anybody.
“Maybe it never gets that far because the dude who pulls you over is from the campus police. ‘I’ve been here for several years,’ he tells you. I know your coaches down there. I’ll handle this.’ He says, ‘Look, I’m going to make sure you get home.’ He doesn’t say, ‘Give me tickets and I’ll take care of this.’ It doesn’t happen like that. That’s propaganda. He squashes it. It gets dropped, or reduced to a misdemeanor. If you get the misdemeanor, well now you have to do fifteen hours of community service. First you think, ‘Fifteen hours of community service!’ Well, according to the coaches, you’re already doing community service because most athletes who are somebody—the school has them going to talk to people. So you’re there for three hours and you get marked down for ten. You get marked down for everything. The lunch and the drive and after the drive and by the time you make one trip, fifteen hours are gone. That’s how that stuff works.
“Then what happens? You catch a touchdown against the big rival. All of a sudden you’re a hero. Now you’re talking to your girlfriend, maybe one of your girlfriends, and she says, ‘Why were you with that girl?’ ‘Shut up!’ Pop. You slap her. You smack her. Now I’m out of control. You figure it’s okay because you’re dating. I put my hands on her? That’s the problem. What happens from there? Now it’s not just yourself you’re hurting anymore. You’re dealing with other people. You assaulted a female. She’s eighteen years old, nineteen years old. She’s not used to violence and you smack her. Whether she reports it or not, look what’s happening. You know you’re going to get away with it. The coach asks, ‘Did you smack her?’ ‘Yeah. I lost control.’ ‘The last time you had fifteen hours of community service. Now you got a hundred.’ What does the player say? ‘Do I still get to play?’ The coach knows he’s got it made. ‘Because it’s February, you’re suspended for the spring. But be ready for the fall.’ That’s what happens.
“The next time, the next crime is worse. The pattern—if you don’t put the fear of God in them the first time—will continue and never end. At least not until you end up dead or in jail. You see, each time, the coach tells you he’s giving you a second chance. He might even tell you you have to ‘earn’ a second chance. But how many times do they let you get away with it, before it’s not a second chance anymore? It is just expected.
“So you take a guy that has learned these lessons in college, you hand him $250,000 a year, maybe a million, and you wonder why you have criminals in the NFL? How can you even have a question? And then, trust me, it ain’t getting fixed when they get in the league. If anything, they’re even more forgiving. So it all continues and who is going to make it stop?”
Henley posed the question, paused, then shook his head slowly and asked it again.
“Who is going to make it stop?”
To some, no less than the future of the NFL hinges on finding an answer to that question.
U
ltimately there are fans, F-A-N-S, that support athletic leagues and teams and at some point I think you turn those fans off,” said Pat Haden, a former Rams quarterback turned lawyer and broadcaster. “They stop going to games, they stop watching games, they stop listening to games, they stop buying products that are advertising the games. I think at some point you just get so sick and tired of it [the boorish behavior of athletes]…. There will come a time, when people aren’t gonna show up or watch. The NFL’s got to watch out.”
“I don’t think there’s any question that when you lose Joe Blue Collar out there who buys the tickets, that you are going to eventually die,” player agent Ralph Cindrich said. “It’s still the values of that everyday man that fuels this league. If those fans become so sick and tired of it as to walk away from the game, I don’t think there’s any question the league will be hurting.”
“The NFL is definitely on the road to a real disastrous problem if it continues in the direction it’s going,” Hall of Fame middle linebacker Lee Roy Jordan told the authors. “How many chances do you give a twenty-five- or thirty-year-old athlete who is making $150,000 to several million dollars a year? How many chances do they deserve before they take responsibility for themselves and live within the guidelines and the laws of the land?”
The NFL is accustomed to hearing suggestions that it clean up its players’ acts. From issues as diverse as domestic violence to drug use, some of America’s most prominent leaders have suggested that the league step up and, through strong discipline, send a message to young people.
In nearly every case, the league has responded with silence or with a statement suggesting it is only a microcosm of society, that its problems are no greater than you’d find in any neighborhood.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in March 1998 that he would like to see all professional sports leagues demand that athletes who fail drug tests be suspended for life unless they turn over to authorities the name of the dealer that sold them their drugs. As powerful as the suggestion was, it was simply brushed aside by the NFL.
“The response of the NFL, like the other leagues, was really weak,” Gingrich said in an interview for this book. “They issued some general comments that they’re all freestanding businesses and they can’t demand things like that from the commissioner’s office. First of all, they need to remember we’re describing behavior which violates the law. It is illegal to buy drugs. It is illegal to use drugs. So we could, technically, enforce these much more rigorously for people who engage in interstate commerce. There’s not a single professional sport that is not, by definition, interstate commerce. So here you have leagues, many of which play in municipal stadiums with tax-free bonds building the facility they are involved in. They have all sorts of exemptions from antitrust in the case of some of the leagues. They make their living out of advertising which is tax deductible and tickets which are often bought as business expenses. Then having used the government to make sure they are as wealthy as possible, they try and say the government shouldn’t stick its nose into our business.
“I’m just saying, as public institutions of public authority, that survive because of public purchase and public support, they also have a public responsibility,” the Speaker said. “I was very disappointed. They had a chance to show leadership and they failed.”
Gingrich was not the first leader in Washington to admonish the NFL to take a tougher stand against drugs. Back in 1989, then-U.S. Drug Czar William Bennett summoned the commissioners of each of the professional leagues to discuss how sports teams could demand that athletes be better role models.
“What I’m hoping for is a strong signal from this community that it understands its responsibilities,” Bennett told the
Washington Post
in 1989. “What happens in these [pro] sports is a form of instruction and a national classroom. From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
If Bennett expected much from the NFL, he was disappointed. Little changed after the meeting Bennett convened in Washington.
The problem, as Darryl Henley said, is that there is an endless line of finger pointing. It is akin to the problems in education— high schools point to junior high schools, junior high schools point to elementary schools, elementary schools point at bad parents. In the end, kids who can’t read keep pouring into the workforce, not sure who they should be pointing the finger at. Meanwhile, no one steps forward to solve the problem.
When it comes to the criminal conduct of our athletes, someone has to step up. Someone must send the message that Sunday’s heroes can no longer be Tuesday’s wife beaters or Wednesday’s rapists.
There are at least four different “groups” that can send this message:
The Media.
Media scrutiny of player backgrounds—not just at the professional, but also the college level—should equal that of the attention paid to backgrounds of other community leaders. Players should expect that scrutiny will accompany a scholarship or a job in the NFL, positions that, rightly or wrongly, demand that athletes act as role models. If the player knows that his actions may one day cause him and his family front-page embarrassment— and a loss of endorsement dollars—some might think twice before entering the ranks of the criminal.
Colleges.
Colleges, where one might argue “chances” should be taken in an effort to straighten lives out, need to teach socialization skills to at-risk athletes. “Most of their lives, everything for these young men revolves around being football players, not people,” said Steven Bucky, team psychologist for the San Diego Chargers. “They’re not taught how to deal with relationships, with anger, with personal problems. Nobody has taken it upon themselves to develop within these football players the socialization skills that the rest of us learn. They just learn how to hit and run.” Unfortunately those skills aren’t being taught where they should be—at home—because too many parents spend their time fawning over young stars. So Bucky and others have proposed that colleges add this to their “real life curriculum.”
NFL Teams.
The league’s thirty teams need to show more discipline. If teams were to hit players the only place where they seem to understand pain—the pocketbook—you may actually have a chance to stem the tide of abhorrent behavior. Don’t draft problem players. Leave a few of them unemployed and, soon enough, the point will come across. Cut your criminals—most NFL contracts already include heretofore largely ignored “character clauses” spelling out expected behavior—and then hope other teams can rise to the same standard. Is that too much to ask? “No,” New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft said simply. “You just have to have standards.”
Though teams appeared to have made some strides in this area during the 1998 draft, more than one draft insider believed that was a direct result of Lawrence Phillips’s flop as a Ram. “Had Phillips rushed for 1,500 yards each of these last two years, Randy Moss would have been seen as less of a risk and would have landed in the top five picks,” agent Jerome Stanley said.
The problem, as Darryl Henley described above, is that coaches don’t lose their jobs for what happens on Tuesdays. So if teams like the New England Patriots choose to leave talent in the draft in favor of character, they have to be equally forgiving if their team loses a game or two. The history of the NFL doesn’t show that teams are willing to do that. The NBA found that same lack of discipline among its teams, requiring that the league office insert itself in off-court disciplinary decisions. “In terms of teams disciplining players, teams always have their own private agenda, that’s why it was important for the commissioner to step in,” NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik told the authors. “We think fans don’t want to see NBA players behave that way and one of the responsibilities that comes with playing in the NBA is that you conduct yourself in a certain way. We don’t think it’s too much to ask that you don’t engage in criminal conduct. We think our fans are entitled to judge the NBA on the basis of the way it reacts to things.”
The Commissioner.
As Granik’s boss, NBA commissioner David Stern, attempted during the 1997–98 season, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue must step in and set high standards. During the March 1998 owners meetings, Tagliabue made public a policy he had quietly begun distributing to teams sometime during the fall of 1997. The policy allows the commissioner to start meting out discipline for off-field behavior. For reasons that went unexplained, Tagliabue let the policy gather dust while players like Cornelius Bennett (see Chapter 2) continue drawing NFL paychecks. At the spring 1998 meetings—seven days after declining the authors’ invitation to comment on the league’s policy toward the criminal conduct of its players—Tagliabue announced that he was prepared to actually start using his power.